Queensferry Crossing is firmly on the map

The Queensferry Crossing opens to traffic today and joins the Forth Road Bridge and Forth Bridge in spanning the Firth of Forth. Our surveyors Derek Smith and Guy Rodger visited the site last week to add some final details, along with Alastair Dalton from The Scotsman newspaper.

OS MasterMap showing the three bridges

Alastair worked with the team to see how our surveyors’ GNSS receivers lock on to several satellites and a series of ground stations and provide calculations which are accurate to within a few centimetres.

Our surveying team have been visiting through the construction of the bridge to ensure our geospatial database contains the latest information – and our Flying Unit have also been overhead checking on progress. Compare these shots from spring 2016 and spring 2017, showcasing the three bridges from three different centuries.

April 2016

May 2017

The surveying team have been capturing all of the road changes in the area, as the new 1.7 mile bridge will become part of the motorway network next month and carry the M90 across the Firth of Forth. The new road features and bridge are joining the 550 million geospatial features in our database of Great Britain.

Surveying in February 2017

While the bridge is open to traffic today and tomorrow, it will then close until 6 September. The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh will be officially opening the bridge on 4 September, 53 years to the days after opening the Forth Road Bridge.

On 1-2 September, members of the public will enjoy the Queensferry Crossing Experience. 50,000 members of the public have the unique opportunity to walk across the bridge – following a ballot that attracted almost 250,000 entries.

On 5 September, an additional ‘community day’ has been added, giving up to 10,000 more people from local schools and community groups on both sides of the Forth the chance to walk on the bridge. From 7 September onwards the bridge will re-open to traffic with no pedestrian access.

While this is a very high-profile example, surveying tasks like this form a part of the 10,000 changes a day taking place in our database of Great Britain. The variety of jobs faced by our 250 surveyors and Flying Unit is unending as the country constantly develops.

It’s all in our database and we’ve shown it in OS MasterMap Topography Layer in the blog article, which is updated for customers every six weeks. The database changes will then filter through to other products depending on their update schedule, which won’t be as frequent as OS MasterMap. For example, our 1:50k is updated quarterly.

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